ce Igor," two symphonies and the
torso of a third, a symphonic sketch, "On the Steppes," two string
quartets, and a score of songs. And many of these works are incomplete.
"Prince Igor" is a fragmentary composition, a series of not quite
satisfactorily conjoined numbers, a golden mosaic from which whole
groups of enameled bits are missing. Indeed, Borodin had not even
notated the overture when he died, and we know it thanks only to a
pupil who had heard him play it on the piano and recollected it well
enough to reconstruct it. Other of his works that are complete are
spotty, commingled dross and gold. He was a curiously uneven workman.
There appear to have been whole regions of his personality that remained
unsensitized. Part of him seems to have gone out toward a new free
Russian music; part of him seems to have been satisfied with the style
of the Italian operas in vogue in Russia during his youth. He who in the
dances from "Prince Igor" wrote some of the most pungent, supple, wild
of music could also write airs sweetly Italian and conventional. The
most free and ruddy and brave of his pages are juxtaposed with some of
the most soft and timid. In his opera a recitative of clear, passionate
accent serves to introduce a pretty cavatina; "Prince Igor's"
magnificent scene, so original and contained and vigorous, is followed
by a cloying duet worthy of a Tchaikowsky opera. The adagio of the
B-minor Symphony, lovely as it is, has not quite the solidity and weight
of the other movements. The happy, popular and brilliantly original
themes and ideas of the first quartet are organized with a distinct
unskilfulness, while the artistic value of the second is seriously
damaged by the cheapness of its cavatina. His workmanship continually
reminds one that Borodin was unable to devote himself entirely to
composition; that he could come to his writing table only at intervals,
only in hours of recreation; and that the government of the Tsar left
him to support himself by instructing in chemistry in the College of
Medicine and Surgery in Moscow, and kept him always something of an
amateur. Borodin the composer is after all only the composer of a few
fragments.

But sometimes, amid the ruins of an Eastern city, men find a slab of
porphyry or malachite so gorgeously grained, that not many whole and
perfect works of art can stand undimmed and undiminished beside it. Such
is the music of Borodin.

Rimsky-Korsakoff

The music of